It shouldn’t surprise anyone when FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s comes out with abysmal ideas to ‘improve’ football.  After all, this is the man that suggested that women footballers wear tighter shorts, instituted automatic suspensions for those wrongly sent off, and has arbitrarily banned playing football more than 3,000 metres above sea level.

But none of these threatens to fundamentally alter the way the game is played (except in Bolivia, where the altitude rule is not going down well).  By contrast, his plan to indigenise all the football leagues of the world, by putting absolute limits on the number of foreign players that a club can field, is a characteristic absurdity that uncharacteristically threatens to undermine football globally.

No matter what the justification, there is a name for placing quotas based upon the origin of an employee: racism.  I’m staunchly opposed to so-called ‘equal rights’ legislation that bans companies from hiring whomever they want; if a club wishes to prosecute a policy of hiring only English or British players, that’s for them to decide.

Overseas, Athletic Bilbao’s cantera policy, of signing only Basque players, is much lauded for improving links with the local community and developing Athletic’s identity.  However, such a policy should be decided by each club, each business, by itself.  To do otherwise is to force individuals to make decisions that hurt themselves and that - in the aggregate - can only hurt the game of football, particularly at its top levels.

But, then again, maybe that’s just my own self-interest talking.  My season ticket at Arsenal sets me back over £1,200 a year: a steep price for a student, and one that I’m only willing to pay because it allows me to watch the most attractive and (for the moment) most success football in the world.  Arsène Wenger’s first-choice XI has a grand total of zero British players.

If the club is required to field five players eligible for the England team, as Blatter suggests, I, along with thousands of other fans faced with a hefty bill to watch top-flight football, will chuck it in and retire to my sofa.  That’s clearly not in the interest of me, of the players, of the club, of the Premiership, or of football as a whole.

To create a quota for home-grown players is fundamentally contrary to the principles of liberty and individualism, can only hurt the game of football by reducing the enjoyment by the fans, and will destroy what is otherwise a highly successful industry.  Furthermore, it institutionalises and promotes a form of racist autarky that will serve to move countries and peoples away from, not towards, each other.  Sepp Blatter, head of an international body with more members than the UN, should know better than to charge head-first into such a disastrous intervention.

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and one of the most talented and distinguished living scientists in the world, got himself into a furore this week. In an interview in the Sunday Times magazine, he argued that Africa would remain forever underdeveloped, on account of the supposed inferior intelligence of the African population.

Watson’s statement was a travesty of science. However, the reaction to his statement has been a travesty, too. The Nobel Prize winner should have been criticised by fellow scientists, countered in peer-reviewed journals, or simply dismissed professionally as a once-great has-been that has not been at the forefront of biology for decades.

Instead, he has been suspended from his job at a laboratory in New York, forced to cancel his speaking tour (including at the Science Museum in South Kensington tonight), and had his reputation torn to pieces in public without debate or discussion.

A range of scientific opinion came down on him in public like a tonne of bricks, including the Federation of American Scientists, which called his comments ‘noxious’. However, surely the most noxious of the statements was by the Science Museum, which asserted that Watson’s comments were ‘beyond the point of acceptable debate’.

To assert that any scientific opinion is not open to debate is an affront to both scientific and social principles. The scientific method demands the advance of statements that may be right or wrong, their debate, and their test. It the statement is correct, it will victor in the debate, and be proven by the tests. If the statement is incorrect, it will be defeated in the debate, and disproven by the tests. However, to argue that a statement cannot be debated, for reasons of political correctness, runs fundamentally counter to the idea of scientific discovery.

To throw away these principles takes us out of the Enlightenment, and throws us back into the Inquisition: when certain scientific ideas, such as the Earth daring to revolve around the Sun, were deemed so politically unappetising, that any scientist that proposed them was soon brutally murdered.

There are a number of scientific issues that have been settled through a process of political ostracism: either promoted by the political-scientific ‘consensus’ (the anthropogenic theory of global warming being the most prominent) or opposed by it (as Watson’s is).

Regardless of one’s position in the scientific debate, there can be only one position to hold in the political one. The over-reaction means only that free speech is denied, that minority opinions are unheard, and that reason is held subservient to convenience, presenting a critical threat: not just to our scientific future, but to our political one, too.